My own little group got along splendidly. There was but a single tragedy among us. It was sufficiently terrible, but almost miraculously it cost the life of only one man. He was a bomb-bearer. He was carrying a box of the explosives for use at close range when we actually came upon the German trenches. A piece of shrapnel struck the box. There was immediately a deafening roar which struck through the grand noise of the battle and the poor fellow was blown utterly to pieces. Fragments of his body were whipped into the faces of his comrades. The whole platoon halted and were shaken for an instant, but at a yell from me got their nerves back with admirable promptitude and threw themselves along in the advance. Then our front lines walked into a drive of rifle-bullets and bombs and we made our first rush for the Germans. The star-shells suddenly disappeared. Out of the glare in which we had been advancing, in an instant we found ourselves fighting in inky darkness. Hans had no intention of illuminating his barbed-wire barriers to aid us in the irksome task of cutting them down and clearing them away. But our barrage fire, we were soon to know, had done some very good work in this direction. Most of the barbed-wire barricades had been obliterated by the rush of our heavy shells. The work of routing the Boche out of that sky-line trench was very swiftly done. We gave them bombs a plenty and then smashed right down into the trench and its traverses after them with knife and pistol and more bombs. We cornered group after group of them in the “bays.” These all whined to us “Kamerad!” They had better fought. I knew too much of them after Flanders, the dirty deceptions they were capable of practicing. The murderous pretenses of surrender. My heart was rankling too bitterly in the memory of the ghastly cruelties I had known them to practice on the men of our commands who fell into their ruthless, barbarous hands. If the orders I gave in answer to these calls are to be regarded as merciless, the dishonorable Huns have only themselves to blame. Our answers to their calls of “Kamerad!” were bombs in their faces. As I climbed across one of the trench parapets I nearly fell over a man’s leg. I leaned down to feel for a supposed enemy, grasped the leg, seeking to pull the man forward. To my horror I stood with a severed leg clutched in my hand. And a tremulous voice came up, the tone indicating a mere boy: “Norfolk, sir,” he said, “I’m terribly wounded. For God’s sake don’t leave me.” Three days before the Norfolks had made an attempt to take this trench and had been all but entirely wiped out.